Last week, Alex MacCaw posted an article on the Sourcing.io blog which focused on a very opinionated way to develop and structure Sinatra applications. He’s even released a companion gem called Trevi that bundles all of this knowledge up and helps you follow along.

ActiveRestClient is a gem is for accessing REST services in an ActiveRecord style. It aims to be a more flexible alternative to ActiveResource. It allows things like setting different endpoints for different REST actions and has additional features like built-in caching.

ENV! is a variant for supporting 12-Factor Apps similar to dotenv, but which provides a bit more friendly onboarding experience to a new application. Where dotenv just loads whatever is in your .env file into ENV, ENV! will fail loudly if required variables are undefined or missing and gives you the opportunity to provide helpful messages in that case.

Maurício Linhares published an article last week detailing how to use Foreman to isolate and manage application development on OS X machines. He points out that while installing Postgres, for example, is a good thing, you don’t necessarily need it running all the time. The same is true for other application dependencies, like Redis.

MooseX is a DSL that helps to make Object Oriented programming in Ruby easier, more consistent, and less tedious. The gem is maintained by Tiago Peczenyj and it's based on Perl's Moose and Moo, two very popular modules in the Perl community. With MooseX you can think more about what you want to do and less about the mechanics of OOP.

The nominations are open for Ruby Heroes 2014. Head on over to rubyheroes.com, armed with the GitHub usernames of people who have made this past last year a pleasure for you to be in the Ruby community.

Weekly Elixir news, control your AR Drone with Argus, use STI with an hstore, learning about Rails validators, sparklines in Ruby, and readme searching with HandCooler all in this episode of the Ruby5!